Author: TSA Press

The Zimbabwean judiciary has said it would introduce live streaming of court cases attracting public and national interest at the Constitutional Court, starting from the 2020 Legal Year.

The move is vital to the country by promoting transparency and accountability while members of the public will be able to know what is going on in court, Chief Justice Luke Malaba said in his keynote address on Monday.

According to Malaba, the innovation would inspire confidence in the functioning of the judiciary, giving it the respect deserved as a co-equal organ of the state. He revealed that the live streaming of the 2018 Presidential election petition geared the innovation, hence the idea to make this a permanent feature.

“The most-watched court case that was streamed live in recent times was the August 2018 election petition by MDC leader Nelson Chamisa against the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) and Zanu-PF, which was unanimously thrown out by all nine Constitutional Court judges for lack of evidence,” said Malaba.

To increase accessibility to courts and enhance the transparency of the judiciary, many countries all across the world have permitted variants of the recording of court hearings. While some countries permit live streaming, others agree on video recording which is published in a few days.

South Africa, at the discretion of the judges, allows for the live streaming and televising of proceedings of the courts. Their Supreme Court of Appeal upheld the authority of a court to grant access to media inside the courtrooms for the purpose of recording and televising the proceedings after the presiding judge’s permission.

Also in India, the Supreme Court in 2018 pushed for transparency in the court sittings by allowing live-streaming of the court cases of constitutional importance which would serve as an instrument for greater accountability.

In the Asian nation, cases on environmental issues, air pollution, ban on liquor sales near national highways, ban on firecrackers and extrajudicial killings were not allowed to be streamed but the court has deemed it necessary and of great importance that they are now handled in courts with a live stream.

Importantly, the introduction of live streaming will encourage the principle of open court, effectuate the public’s right to know and reduce dependence on secondhand views.

Meanwhile, the recent economic situation in Zimbabwe calls for a new approach to solve the current economic crisis in the country. And following the move by the judiciary, there have been calls on the government to attend to more urgent matters rather than introducing a seemingly unnecessary live streaming process of court cases.

Post published in: Featured

Continuing our series of questions on fictional lawyers, what fictional attorney graduated top of the class from Georgetown Law in 1992 before taking almost a decade off from the law before rejoining the workforce as an associate in a law school friend’s firm?

Hint: Over the course of the character’s story, there are other firms and a brief foray into government.

See the answer on the next page.

The legal services industry has significantly evolved over the past decade and, as we enter 2020, corporations are well-positioned to accelerate the transformation of law departments. We recently sat down with Joy Saphla, President and Co-Founder of Morae Global, a full-service, tech-enabled service provider that works with major corporations and law firms globally to transform how legal services are being delivered in a sustainable manner, including through a smaller financial footprint, more efficient service delivery, improved performance, and all without compromising risk management. Joy gave us her thoughts on what’s driving the transformation of law departments and the relevant trends we can expect to see this year.

Why are we seeing law department transformation heat up going into 2020?

Transformation is heating up, in part, organically as a function of the business climate we are in. Leaders in the legal industry are seeing unprecedented global uncertainty right now, stemming from an ever-changing regulatory landscape and the pace at which new regulations are coming online. There is equal concern around the economy, notably the anticipation of a possible recession, coupled with geopolitical volatility and an ever-present risk of cybersecurity breaches.

Law departments are having to balance a need to make decisions on investments in technology against a dizzying array of global regulations being developed and passed. This requires spending budget on the right solutions while at the same time addressing increasing pressure to reduce or retain their spend levels. The apparent conflict creates an internal motivation to look at operations and think about what types of transformations are needed most. The objective is for businesses to continue to be able operate in risk-prone areas of the world and simultaneously better manage law department spend, track metrics on how effectively and efficiently legal work is being done, and establish greater predictability into where departments will need to invest to stay ahead of the curve on risk and cost management.

How will we see spend management change in the coming year?

Corporations are asking for more proactive spend management and reporting. The priority on metrics reporting and tools like dashboards will be higher than it’s ever been. There’s a growing need to know where you’re heading in order to avoid budget surprises and yet drive the best transformation possible for how legal work is being done. Many companies are anticipating a possible economic recession, so spend management is naturally a focus. At the same time, general counsel and COOs are actively looking for the funds to support technology enhancements that are most crucial for addressing requirements for regulatory compliance.

In addition, companies will be thinking about outside counsel management somewhat differently than they have in the past. Alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) are taking on a growing role in the legal services supply chain and therefore a larger portion of law department legal spend. The ongoing shift to ALSPs saw a rise in 2019 and I believe this will continue in 2020, so much so that we should drop the A and simply call them LSPs. Legal services have become a three-way ecosystem of legal departments, law firms, and LSPs. Companies ought to think about how their infrastructure is set up in order to accommodate all three participants in the overall value chain.

You mentioned the changing regulatory landscape. What major regulatory changes are driving transformation in 2020?

A good example of this is LIBOR, a benchmark interest rate used by many global banks which is retiring at the end of 2021. We’re at a point now in 2020 when the evaluation of how to address LIBOR should have already been done so that companies can now gear up for change implementation. Of course, such is not always quite the case. Morae Global has been working with a number of our clients on putting fast-tracked solutions into place. We have both the legal pedigree and technological capabilities that many corporations are beginning to discover that they need in order to get over the LIBOR hurdle.

Another key regulatory challenge is the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which went into effect January 1, 2020. It is essentially a U.S. equivalent to the GDPR. Companies need to be sure their data collection, retention, and security practices are in compliance. Both LIBOR and CCPA are taking higher priorities for many organizations because, despite knowing that these changes were coming, they may not be as far along with preparations as they would like to be. The issues are complex to solve.

For example, law departments are finding they must conduct data security audits of their law firms. Under the specter of news headlines about data breaches, companies are rightfully concerned about ensuring their firms have the proper security and infrastructure in place to manage corporate data on their behalf. Morae does help our clients with these kinds of audits. I believe the legal market will see an increase in this type of cybersecurity activity in 2020.

The impact of Brexit is another important consideration. With the UK withdrawing as a member of the European Union on January 31, 2020, businesses with UK operations should have updated data policies and procedures ready to go with regard to GDPR requirements. Ideally they do not want to suddenly find themselves effectively exporting data outside of the EU without the appropriate measures being in place. The GDPR doesn’t prevent the export of the data, but there are conditions for how data should be treated in these circumstances. In the US, we have the Safe Harbor program to help guide these efforts. Organizations will want to ensure they utilize the appropriate data handling mechanisms in the UK too. 

What role will technology play in transformation?

Technology, and more importantly how it’s used, represents a major underpinning of the transformations we’ll see. Cloud-enabled technology will play a significant role as the economy continues to globalize and move toward ever more collaborative teams. Morae Global embraces this trend and we’ve successfully helped our clients around the world with the transition of over a billion documents to the cloud. We’re not simply a tech company that sells software, but rather almost every solution we deliver has technology woven in. 

Cloud is not simply an endgame either. It can enable more effective use of technology across dispersed teams. So it is a crucial part of achieving meaningful transformation, especially in the areas of self-service and cost containment. AI in particular is seeing a steady rise in adoption, with one example being the growing popularity of law department dashboards and metrics reporting. These capabilities facilitate more informed decision-making. Moreover, by using technology to perform tasks that humans were previously doing manually, legal teams can shift their focus to higher value tasks, work more efficiently, and free up more time to engage and partner with the rest of their business. The role of legal will move to emphasizing a combination of business and legal advice to help their organizations navigate risk, not just to avoid it, and ultimately help facilitate reaching difficult business goals. 

Automation is another important technology trend, which is not just about improvements in cost savings and efficiency. It can enable self-service functions that will help companies to manage risk in highly specific ways. When you’re no longer solely relying on individuals to make the right judgement calls, you’re able to drive greater process consistency and you can gain enhanced peripheral vision of the issues with a wider array of metrics data at your fingertips. The trend for self-service is quite significant. Often these functions will have legal service requests feeding directly into workflow automation, which is a powerful enabler of efficiency. But I’d like to see more law firms proactively partnering with legal service providers to offer these capabilities to law departments. It goes right to the heart of improving the legal supply chain and helping to drive better performance management of all the constituent parts.

Are there any other transformation trends you expect to see in 2020?

We’ve now been through the era of internalizing resources. In 2020, the trends we’ll see are an increase in self-service and a shift of work into managed services. The type of work performed within law departments will evolve too, most notably including the reallocation of resources to perform higher-value, more meaningful legal work. I expect this will take the form of law departments increasingly partnering with providers and moving internal resources into proactive risk management and business growth roles. 

It is clear law departments are under a lot of pressure, not unlike other business functions, and so they must demonstrate the value they bring to their organizations. While we no longer talk about them as cost centers, they don’t generate any revenue. So having the right information at their fingertips will be crucial to showing that they are using their resources wisely and generating measurable value to the business. This will help the department leadership to justify the need for further investments in technology and resources in order to deliver the best value possible while still managing risk within acceptable thresholds. AI, dashboards, automation, data insights, all of these capabilities will be instrumental to continued law department transformation in 2020.

Satterlee Stephens has served financial industry clients in New York for over 100 years without ever feeling the need to get too big. But the firm’s expertise may finally lead the 65-attorney stalwart into a new arrangement on a much bigger stage.

Duane Morris, the 800+ attorney Philadelphia-based global firm is in tie-up talks with Satterlee in a bid that could bolster the Am Law 100 firm’s New York presence by bringing Satterlee’s small but highly profitable business under the Duane Morris umbrella.

This is the point where we remind everyone that regardless of how “advanced” merger talks are, nothing is over until it’s over. Still, given the geographic overlap of the two firms — Duane Morris already has 100 lawyers in the city — the mere fact that the firms are pushing ahead with talks suggests they’ve already decided the client overlap is minimal at most.

We’ll keep an eye on this one.

Duane Morris, Satterlee Stephens in Advanced Tie-Up Talks [New York Law Journal]

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Upgrading your practice’s financial software can feel like trying to change a flat tire while driving on the highway: at best, it will slow down your forward movement and it might even lead to a disastrous crash. In today’s technology driven landscape,staying up-to-date on the most current solutions – particularly those that help streamline your financial platforms – is the key to maintaining your competitive edge as a law firm. But transitioning your firm isn’t without its challenges. What tech should you use? What are the first steps you should take? How do you integrate new software without halting your firm to a standstill? How do you maintain your revenue, clients, and sanity during the process?

Balancing technology innovation with profitability and productivity is one of the biggest challenges law firm leaders face. And when it comes to your financial software in particular, it’s not a challenge you can afford to fumble.  Fortunately, Thomson Reuters has the answer. In the new whitepaper, “Five Ways Transitional Products Can Enhance Your Enterprise Software,” Thomson Reuters shows you how to evaluate the technology roadmap for your financial software and why its transitional product packages are your best bet for driving efficiency and enabling insights during a technology transition. 

In this white paper you will learn just what the Thomson Reuters transitional product packages encompass, why these packages are the best way to avoid slowing your teams down during a technology update, and why you shouldn’t wait any longer to invest in a smoother, more productive path for your firm.

Download the paper here or simply fill out the form below for access.

Government

The 28th Amendment should be on its way to the Constitution, but Trump’s Department of Justice has declared it dead.

By Joe Patrice

at 3:01 PM

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While we lawyers disagree about many things, one thing that all of us, whether lawyers of whatever vintage, law students, law professors, “thinking about law school” peeps, agree on: the nightmare that is the bar exam, that last hurdle to getting licensed (assuming you’ve passed the moral fitness test and whatever other things lurk in the shadows).

The bar exam: destined to freak out the most stoic, stolid, and calm. It strikes terror in the hearts and minds, even the most outwardly self-possessed. The bar exam: purportedly designed to test the minimum competency required to practice. And that’s the rub, what exactly is minimum competency? How to define it, how to test it, how to use it as a tool to determine who gets that license. How to decide what subjects should be tested. How to decide whether the exam should be in one day, two days, or longer. (Perish the thought, although when I took it in dinosaur days, it was a three-day exam.)

More than 30 states, along with D.C. and the U.S.V.I. have adopted the uniform bar exam. California has not. (A nationwide uniform bar exam might make it easier to argue for multijurisdictional practice, which would be something I would like to see along with many others.)

Although the bar exam is not a marathon, it feels like one. Everyone who finishes it is exhausted and broke. Is the juice worth the squeeze? That depends on who is asked.

Is the bar exam I took all those years ago obsolete? Yes and no. This is not a trick question. There’s much intellectual wrestling going on among law professors, bar administrators, and others interested in the quality of new admittees.

What should the bar exam look like? What should it test? Should it test what some call “rote memorization,” the reciting of legal principles? I think that memorization has its place because I don’t think you can analyze an issue without knowing what the law is to apply to the fact pattern in the question. However, I don’t think the bar exam needs to test whether we can recite the Rule Against Perpetuities.

Should the bar exam be “open book”? One could argue that the practice of law is “open book,” since we should look up what the law is before advising a client. Aha, say some, precisely the point, since “rote memorization” does not have any place in any practice. True, but isn’t there at least some reason for being able to “show what you know” on the bar exam? Reasonable minds can and do differ.

What about “soft skills”? Should those be tested on the bar exam? Can they be? How would you go about doing that? What would be the “soft skills” that should be tested?

Do the courses that formed the backbone of our legal education, and thus the bar exam, still merit inclusion on that test? Does “minimum competency” mean “bare bones” competency, or should it be something more than that?

Should areas of law that didn’t even exist at the turn of this century, let alone in my dinosaur days, be tested now? Should the bar exam remain an unwavering, unchanging monolith without acknowledging that times have changed, and the practice is pretty much unrecognizable today? Should there be more time to answer essay questions? More time to plow through the multiple-choice questions? (You need to be able to respond quickly to a judge’s question in court, but even then, you may be able to get time to brief the issue.)

There are major huddles going on as to what to do about the bar exam. Minorities don’t do as well on it, and as we become more diverse, we need more diversity among lawyers. (Not a new topic for me or for the many others who regularly rail about the issue; there’s a comfort level in being represented by someone who looks like you.)

I don’t think any idea, no matter how wild or crazy, should be off the table when considering how to test minimum competency, enlarge the pool of successful bar takers while maintaining applicable standards, and, yes, I know the cut score here in California is a huge sore point.

While I don’t know what the requirements are in other states for the CPA exam, California requires one year of work experience in order to obtain a CPA license. (Anyone for legal apprenticeship?) Also, since the average pass rate is 50%, applicants can retake those portions of the exam they didn’t pass the first time.

There’s no similar provision for bar examinees: it’s all or nothing. Should that change? I can hear the arguments against it, including administrative headaches, timing of exams, and student loan debt, among others, but we’ve got to think about innovative ways of changing the bar exam so that it better serves both the examinees and the public. Maybe testing in one “swell foop” is not the answer.

We have to find better ways to make the bar exam relevant to today’s practice and more representative of society, while still requiring minimum competency. We are thought to be smarter than most, at least we think we are. Let’s prove it. Step right up here with suggestions, no matter how silly or left field they may sound. We gotta start somewhere.

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Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

Numerous articles on this website have already discussed how law firm partners are not always the best business managers. It makes sense that just because you are good at practicing law does not mean you are good at running a business or managing people. For that reason, many law firms invest in trainings and use consultants in order to improve their administrative practices. However, one of the most important things partners should keep in mind when managing associates is that they should try to communicate with associates directly rather than passing a message through someone else.

When I was 19, I worked as a politics and government teacher for AmeriCorps. As part of our training, all of the AmeriCorps workers needed to attend conflict resolution courses and other classes. One of the things we learned in the training is that people should try not to “triangle” messages through other people. When you pass a message through someone else, you risk the possibility that some or all of the message will be miscommunicated. In addition, it is much harder to receive feedback about a plan if the message is being conveyed through someone else.

Although partners should know that they shouldn’t play a game of “telephone” when communicating with associates, I have seen partners many times throughout my career communicate to associates through other people. When I was working in Biglaw, there was a much more established chain of command than there was at any other point of my career. The senior partners would usually give large tasks to the junior partners, who would loop in senior associates, who would then provide assignments to junior associates. To be completely honest, that process is sometimes unavoidable in Biglaw. Oftentimes, some Biglaw assignments are so large, and the senior partners are so busy, that it is impractical for the senior partners to dole out all of the work and communicate with everyone about tasks.

However, this “waterfall of work” has negative consequences. By the time associates heard about the facts of a case and the specifics of an assignment, this information had already passed through a number of people and was not always accurate. Oftentimes, people did not want to seek clarification from individuals above them for fear of being accused of not paying attention the first time.

As an associate in Biglaw, a colleague of mine had to conduct an extensive amount of research for an issue in a brief. However, my colleague mistakenly thought that our client was a defendant, when in reality, our client was the plaintiff! Thus, the research my colleague had spent hours conducting needed to be extensively revised before it was submitted to the partner. From speaking with my colleague, it seemed that the information about the case had been so distorted, since several people had already relayed the details, that our client’s role in the case was unclear.

Another time in my career, I suffered consequences because a partner, for whatever reason, gave me a task through another person rather than communicate with me directly. As an associate at a midsize shop, I was once informed by our office manager that a senior partner told her to tell me that I needed to scan and upload deposition transcripts to our document management system. The office manager informed me that I could not work on any other tasks until the assignment was complete. I have absolutely no idea why that mundane and unnecessary job was so important that I had to spend all of my time for a week on it. In any case, since the order had come through the office manager, I could not directly seek clarification from the senior partner.

A lot of deposition transcripts needed to be uploaded, and literally anyone in the office, including a number of administrative professionals, could have completed this project. In addition, the project was substantial and took me a number of days to complete. However, since the partner had chosen to communicate this assignment through the office manager, I had no way of making suggestions or noting the size of the project to the partner without looking like I was going above the office manager’s head.

As a result, I spent five or six solid days scanning and uploading transcripts that people would likely never read to our document management system. Our firm probably missed out on thousands of dollars in revenue on the billable hours I did not log since I was conducting this administrative task. Maybe the partner was just being punitive when he tasked me with performing the assignment. However, if the partner had just communicated this assignment to me directly, I could have quickly responded with suggestions or feedback about the size of the project and saved our firm from losing substantial revenue.

I am not sure why partners feel the need to communicate with associates through other people. Some partners are definitely afraid of confrontation, and they feel that communicating through someone else helps avoid directly confronting people. In addition, some partners are just really busy, and there are definitely issues with micromanaging associates as well. However, partners should strive to communicate directly with associates whenever possible. This helps ensure that associates can provide feedback and that associates understand all of the information related to a project.

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

With increasing focus on the strains the profession places on mental health, Reed Smith has announced a global Mental Health Task Force to help Reed Smith’s team address mental health issues as they arise.

The new task force grew out of the work of the firm’s Looking for Excellence and Advancement of Persons with Disabilities (LEADRS) group, and closely tracks the recommendations of the American Bar Association’s National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being. Partner Kimberly Gold will serve as the inaugural chair of the task force:

“The mission of this task force is to ensure that our lawyers and professional staff have access to help whenever they or their family members experience or are at risk of experiencing mental health or substance use issues. We will also challenge the well-documented stigma surrounding these issues and cultivate a workplace culture that promotes psychological wellness and positive help-seeking behaviors,” Gold said. “We are collaborating with other key members of Reed Smith’s Diversity & Inclusion team to develop a comprehensive strategy for assessing and addressing these outcomes across our global platform.”

The group has scheduled multiple events across the firm, including a Lawyers Assistance Program Panel Webinar in the United States and a Mental Health First Aid Training program. In March, the firm plans to conduct a firmwide survey to identify additional members for its advisory teams.

Hopefully more firms take Reed Smith’s lead.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.